Many futurists have become enamoured of the idea that a future cyberspace will consist of computronium.
The idea that far future creatures will turn matter into computronium seems to be largely based on projecting out the trend towards larger brains. However, there is another relevant aspect - we know from scaling laws is that larger greatures have relatively smaller nervous systems, and relatively larger muscular, skeletal and digestive systems. The organism with the highest brain to body ratio is an ant.
Some hedonists have a similar concept: "hedonium". That represents the arrangement that represents the highest state of pleasure for a given amount of matter.
After giving appropriate weight to the metabolic scaling aspect, I think that "computronium" or "hedonium" are probably not much like what most matter will turn into in the future. The idea ignores biological optimization targets. The purpose of most living things is not to compute or to represent pleasure - but rather to survive and reproduce. It is a different optimization target. Structural, digestive and metabolic elements are especially true if resources are limited and there is competition for them. That is the state which most living ecosystems gravitate towards. It results in more of a zero-sum environment, where to obtain resources to have to deprive another agent of them.
I think that futurists have been fetishizing intelligence and computation. As an example, consider Moravec's "Pigs in cyberspace" article. Planty of references to computation, but muscles and metabolism are sidelined. Bodies themselves are considered expendable and ephemeral. To me, it seems like a weird and twisted perspective which poorly reflects what we know about living systems. It's not that there won't be a cyberspace, but rather than it is likely to be be the tip of an iceberg consisting of other metabolic processes.
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